“I know you’ve seen it!” Individual and social factors for users’ chatting behavior on Facebook

• We investigated the influence of the seen-function on Facebook chatting behavior.
• The influence is related to user’s need to belong and fear of ostracism.
• We explored the influence of message content and social roles on chatting behavior.
• Through cluster analyses we examined different types of Facebook chat users.
• Results indicate a strong impact of personality traits on perception of chat norms.

An online survey (N = 207) investigated how the seen-function influences users’ answering behavior in Facebook chatting. The seen-function is a chat-feature that provides more transparency over the course of a chat conversation and thus may also intensify the mutual awareness of chat partners. Based on the need to belong and fear of ostracism as motivators for user behavior it was hypothesized that users with a higher value of these personality traits would have a higher expectation for others to answer immediately and a higher perceived obligation to answer immediately. Indeed, fear of ostracism and need to belong were positively related to perceived obligations to answer and expectations toward chat partners. However, the perceived obligation to answer immediately was higher than the average expectation toward others to do so. Looking for different clusters of users, we found three groups of users in the data set that differ in terms of their expectations and perceived obligations.